egular or business-like for me to let you have it this way. And more
than this, it's a great inconvenience to me to give you these checks at
unstated times. If you wish to draw out the whole amount let's have some
understanding. Draw it in monthly installments of, say, five hundred
dollars, or else," he added, abruptly, "draw it all at once, now,
to-day. I would even prefer it that way. Otherwise it's--it's annoying.
Come, shall I draw you a check for thirty-seven hundred, and have it
over and done with?"

"No, no," cried Trina, with instinctive apprehension, refusing, she did
not know why. "No, I'll leave it with you. I won't draw out any more."

She took her departure, but paused on the pavement outside the store,
and stood for a moment lost in thought, her eyes beginning to glisten
and her breath coming short. Slowly she turned about and reentered the
store; she came back into the office, and stood trembling at the corner
of Uncle Oelbermann's desk. He looked up sharply. Twice Trina tried to
get her voice, and when it did come to her, she could hardly recognize
it. Between breaths she said:

"Yes, all right--I'll--you can give me--will you give me a check for
thirty-seven hundred? Give me ALL of my money."

A few hours later she entered her little room over the kindergarten,
bolted the door with shaking fingers, and emptied a heavy canvas sack
upon the middle of her bed. Then she opened her trunk, and taking thence
the brass match-box and chamois-skin bag added their contents to the
pile. Next she laid herself upon the bed and gathered the gleaming heaps
of gold pieces to her with both arms, burying her face in them with long
sighs of unspeakable delight.

It was a little past noon, and the day was fine and warm. The leaves
of the huge cherry trees threw off a certain pungent aroma that entered
through the open window, together with long thin shafts of golden
sunlight. Below, in the kindergarten, the children were singing gayly
and marching to the jangling of the piano. Trina heard nothing, saw
nothing. She lay on her bed, her eyes closed, her face buried in a pile
of gold that she encircled with both her arms.

Trina even told herself at last that she was happy once more. McTeague
became a memory--a memory that faded a little every day--dim and
indistinct in the golden splendor of five thousand dollars.

"And yet," Trina would say, "I did love Mac, loved him dearly, only a
little while ago. Even when he hurt